Memeorandum

January 23, 2012

I Absolutely Cannot Wait

Per the Daily Beast, TeamObama is about to launch a defense of their national security credentials. As part of this effort, Eric Holder will take poit in rationalizing the al-Awlaki drone strike:

Now the administration is poised to take its case directly to the American people. In the coming weeks, according to four participants in the debate, Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is planning to make a major address on the administration’s national-security record. Embedded in the speech will be a carefully worded but firm defense of its right to target U.S. citizens. Holder’s remarks will draw heavily on a secret Justice Department legal opinion that provided the justification for the Awlaki killing. The legal memorandum, portions of which were described to The New York Times last October, asserted that it would be lawful to kill Awlaki as long as it was not feasible to capture him alive—and if it could be demonstrated that he represented a real threat to the American people. Further, administration officials contend, Awlaki was covered under the congressional grant of authority to wage war against al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11.

Excellent. The same chap who thought that waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (as we do routinely with US soldiers and airmen in training) represented a loss of America's soul will now explain why whacking disagreeable Americans on a one-off basis is acceptable. Maybe in the same speech he will explain his plans to close Gitmo (another blot on our national character) while preserving all of its capabilites at Bagram. The Niemann media watchdogs just can't figure out why this is being ignored by Big Media, although any righty could explain it.

Cue. The. Laughtrack.

YET IT SEEMS LIKE ONLY YESTERDAY: It was a year ago that Glenn Greenwald was bemoaning Obama's embrace of the Bush/Cheney war on terror; my Evil Excerpter stuck on this:

Aside from the repressiveness of the policies themselves, there are three highly significant and enduring harms from Obama's behavior. First, it creates the impression that Republicans were right all along in the Bush-era War on Terror debates and Democratic critics were wrong.

...

Dick Cheney is not only free of ignominy, but can run around claiming vindication from Obama's actions because he's right. The American Right constantly said during the Bush years that any President who knew what Bush knew and was faced with the duty of keeping the country safe would do the same thing. Obama has provided the best possible evidence imaginable to prove those claims true.

...Obama has won the War on Terror debate -- for the American Right. And as Dick Cheney's interview last night demonstrates, they're every bit as appreciative as they should be.

According to something I read, can't put my fingers on it again, there are already plans and planning deep in the details for three debates. I think the league of wymen voters was mentioned but it appears the machinations have been underway for quite a while. I don't think the muddle will buy any argument that leaves zero debates.

Might be interesting if Newt were to start carrying around a putter and start asking it questions at every campaign stop if Obama were to try it though.

The daily Beast says: "Further, administration officials contend, Awlaki was covered under the congressional grant of authority to wage war against al Qaeda in the wake of 9/11." I mentioned several weeks ago that if the Obamaniacs are killing Iranian nuke scientists, the 9/11 resolution would be a legal basis for the POTUS 'finding'. Well Well-- here we are learning that the 9/11 resolution is a legal basis for the POTUS Finding to kill US citizens. Amazing the moral and legal -- ehr-- flexibility 'Bam and Holder have. And when I point this out to my lib NYC friends?-- they are outraged-- and they'll still vote for 'Bam.

I suspect Newt can figure a way around any crap they try to come up with to rig the debates. Besides he's doing just fine now with their thumbs on the scales. What are they gonna do get conservatives on the panel so Newt can't attack the media?

BTW Prof Jacobson at Legal Insurrection has some excellent reportage on the Upgraded Mittbot v2.0. I'd link but it's a PITA on an iPhone Must reads, though.

'And I have only a faint memory of what happened when they poured cold water over my head. Never before had I gone through such hell. I was in such a frenzy they had difficulty in holding me down. What these strange customs mean is beyond me. No, I haven't the strength to endure it any longer! Good God, what are they doing to me ? They're pouring cold water over my head! They don't heed me, see me or listen to me. What have I done to them?'
========================

The bill's sponsor, Sen. Bob Huff, R-Diamond Bar, said in a news release that the new terminology would be less judgmental.

"My legislation would find another name for low-achieving schools that is more socially acceptable," Huff said in his Senate Floor presentation, according to the news release. "The original legislation was never designed to create a stigma for these low-performing schools, but unfortunately that's what it has become."

Less judgmental Republicans. That's the ticket! Let's ride that to victory.

Debate is in Jacksonville at University of North Florida. No more tickets available. Jacksonville is the 2nd largest city in Georgia (inside joke only Stephanie would get). It is Newt country but there are some well known Ronulans that roam the edges of Duval County.

If Romney, Santorum and the media believe this will friendly territory for them - it ain't. More of what we left in SC.

((Stephanie, would the muddle have any say whatsoever about debates between Pres. Working-my-Rear-off and some impertinent challenger? Let the people complain.))

Yes at the ballot box. Plus I doubt Newt running from campaign stop to campaign stop with The stage set with two podiums, one with a golf putter and Newt behind the other would make very good optics for Prez Putt. Plus just one golf game or holiday trip would destroy that premise of " too busy to debate ". How chafed do you think King Putt or Moochelle would be if their cage becomes more confining? He'll get even more petulant and she will get even angrier. What are the optics gonna look like on that? Two narcissists? One of them would surely go off prompter and whine.

Sorry Frau just calling it with the way the battlefield is currently configured. Personally I think the republicans should have one super Tuesday where all states vote at the same time and no more of this silly caucus crap. Pair the field and have a final runoff and be done with it.

Less judgmental Republicans. That's the ticket! Let's ride that to victory.

What a complete embarrassment by a pandering a-hole. Here are my "less judgemental" suggestions:

1. Flunk out factories
2. Future Wards of the State R Us
3. Daycare for Dummies
4. Don't Know Much About Anything
5. Failure Starts Here
6. I Heart Ayers
7. We Keep Tutors Employed
8. You Spend All That Tax Money and Don't Even Get a Crummy Tee Shirt.
9. Home of Low Expectations
10. If it Doesn't Work Keep Doing It

I don't really agree with Jacobson's defense of Newt's Bain attack (linked within the 1:35/1:36 links). It's Romney's job to defend himself and his industry, but Newt was a sleazebag for taking that particular line of attack, especially with all the OWS/inequality nonsense in the air. What he did was to egg on the media and the Democrats to focus on that rather than Obama's crappy record.

Well ch I was off looking into something and when I cut through the rhetoric I realized that I was looking at a curriculum that had been designed to be equally accessible to those who have no attention span or cannot think well or cannot process print.

And no I am not being facetious.

sbw made a good comment on individuality that I will respond to here rather than on page 6. That's why virtually all curricula now deliberately attack the concept of the individual. It is characterized as the source of oppression and exploitation. Both Global Awareness and Global Competence which sound like you would be well informed on what is going on around the world are actually explicitly code for teaching that the collective has primacy. And the individual has an obligation to defer to the consensus. A big part of education is instilling that belief at a fundamental, emotional level.

Thanks frau. Kids from various backgrounds have different abilities to overcome poor instruction or lack of it so if they are aggregated it can be a low performing school while everything going on in classroom is precisely what is mandated by law. Then the disproportionality gets used to argue for a further diminution in academics.

Arghhhhh...what happens to those of us waiting in the great wasteland to have a say? Is the way we got "Our Good Friend" McCain?

Frau,

By the time the primaries get around to us, Newt will be sailing toward the nomination (pending any more screw ups), and the Obama's will be planning their White House dinner parties and vacations on Air Force One for the next four years.

Re: Low-achieving schools in CA... My wife works at one, as a teacher held in high regard. The kids receive excellent instruction, as mandated to a "T" by the "No Child Left Behind Act". What they lack is competent parenting. My oldest child goes to the same school, receives the same instruction, though she doesn't sit in my wife's classroom, and while only in the 2nd grade, is reading at the 3rd grade level and beyond. She isn't what I could call an "overachiever", but she is supported and loved and encouraged at home to do her best. A certain percentage of the parents in this district do not assist their children in this way yet, and this number is directly reflected in the percentage of kids who underperform when compared to their peers. This is not conjecture. This is observed fact.

NCLB law has, however, created a massive new workload on teachers, who in this district receive no aide time or assistance. Legally, according to CA's own State employment laws, teachers in this district are not even allowed the mandated number of breaks during their workday. My wife often does reports until 8 or 9 PM in the evening, when her time could be better spent with our own kids.

Because of these stupid laws, she no longer wants to teach. NCLB has destroyed her love of helping her students learn. Now there is only bitterness and blame when a child is "low-achieving" in the classroom, even in cases where the parent (often times singular) or grandparent (in the case of incarcerated parents) refuses to come in and meet with the teacher or principal during the school year. Very few children are ever retained, even when they deserve to be. Parents are never held accountable, even though they should be. It is ridiculous that the power of deciding who should pass and who should fail has all but been removed from the very instructors who deal with these children on a daily basis. Disciplinary problems are supposed to be "resolved in the classroom", yet no forms of punishment are allowed to be metted out by teachers. It is now a system of flawed oversight, placing blame on the wrong points, destined to fail simply because it refuses to indict the root causes.

You cannot "mandate" that all children must pass. Only people with a considerably flawed mind could possibly think that you can. The threat has been leveled against my wife's school for two years that the county will come in and "fire everybody" if they fail to meet the absurd targets placed on it. It is a failure of leadership, not of classroom instruction. Failure at the Federal level, the State level, the County level, and at the Principal's office. A failure to confront a degradation in society's morals and to insist upon parents delivering, on their own, a mentally-competent and eager and willing student to the school site each day. Until we hold society accountable, all the laws in the world will be unable to raise school scores.

Until we hold society accountable, all the laws in the world will be unable to raise school scores.

Eric,

How on earth do we "hold society accountable"?

Conservatives are ridiculed for "confronting a degradation in society's morals" by the very liberals who run schools and complain about NCLB.

At least NCLB puts standards in place for benchmarking. What is the alternative? Substandard achievement with no benchmarking? How is that an improvement? It seems to me that would just let schools and teachers off the hook.

I agree with much of what you say and sympathize with your wife's position. It is heartbreaking to see what's happening. But it's very difficult to see how to fix it.

Eric nobody said that parents aren't a large part of the problem. It's too bad that every child doesn't have a set of two parents that place a high value on education and make sure they do their homework; but that's just the situation that exists. Things weren't working before NCLB; it's not like it sprung up for no good reason. I yanked one of my children out of the public school system because I wasn't satisfied by the education she was receiving; and teachers were a significant part of that problem.

IMHO it was in part schools relaxing their standards that produced such lousy results in the parents. Once upon a time parents feared their kids being expelled for bad behavior or poor grades; once that threat was taken away (in all but the most egregiouso situations), is it any wonder that parents allowed behavior and learning to slide?

Anytime you lower standards you get a lesser product.

I wonder - if a pilot group of schools took a day-forward approach and began with the kindergarten class. In the first year of the pilot program, the kids/parents are given a set of rules for behavior and achievement, with a list of consequences that includes expulsion for both. There will be no negotiation on those consequences. I wonder if you would see improvement. I bet you would.

But it would be very difficult to get anything approaching a normal distribution of participants and the schools would never allow it anyway. That kind of thing only happens in private and charter schools.

Eric- It's not new.
I retired from teaching in the 90s and can assure you that what you describe was already in place by then. I was released from the classroom to work for the L.A. County Superintendent's office for teacher and administrator training. After retiring, I did the same on a part-time basis with the San Bernardino County office. What I saw *then* differed from today only in clothing worn and TV programs. Education in California was already in trouble. I did enjoy flights to Sacramento and attending a national conference at Asilomar. Observations in classrooms or staff inservices were not so enjoyable and often embarrassing. Teachers were not always qualified and neither were the administrators.

As local control was relinquished in the name of district funding equality, the state and federal governments moved in to impose more and more requirements. Collective bargaining brought additional burdens and more secrecy about budgets. Money started out in Sacramento. Counties siphoned off a huge chunk--large offices and staff--and then district administrations took their big bites. Administrations grew because the required reports necessitated appropriate people collecting and writing. In 2011, the superintendent for very our small district (one middle school and one high school) received $196,650. California's governor received $173,987 (down from $212,179). That's not a wise distribution of tax money, is it?

I wish we could just teach less and teach better with parental and administrative support. In my college town, we could not retain a child if the parents did not give permission. That did not serve the child's interests at all, but as with discipline, teachers could not prevail in most cases. Standards do serve a purpose for children and teachers alike.

rse, I'm smoothing the rough edges on about eight pages whose working title is "Schooling that matters". It begins:

If education were successful, we’d have been more successful.

“What is the greater problem in the world today,” a teacher asked, “ignorance or apathy?” A voice in the class answered, “I don’t know and I don’t care.”

Kids know schools don’t meet their needs but they can’t escape the classroom. The rest of us are out of the classroom but can’t escape the problem that is so big it colored how the 20th century failed to live up to its potential.

The 20th century seemed to advance except where it mattered. Incredible advances occurred in the sciences--chemistry, physics, biology, psychology, geology, and archeology, engineering, electronics, set and graph theory, gaming, and computation. But socially, we deal with each other much the same as we have for a hundred years: unable to explain when or why a culture becomes destructive.

Last comment on this - my third grader goes to a well-regarded public school and the majority of the parents in the classroom are highly involved. In other words an ideal situation for a public school teacher. My daughter, who did fine in math last year according to her grades, was determined to be behind in her first evaluation of the school year (meaning she somehow fell behind over the summer. Hmm.). We are told we are not drilling her enough in her multiplication tables.

When did it become a parent's job to teach their kid multiplication tables? When I was a kid in the classroom we drilled on this stuff for hours. Did the smart kids get bored? Yes. (I was one of them.) But the point was you have to bring everybody up to speed. That is the teacher's job. Not the parents'.

Her teacher is very smart, incidentally, but she's never taught third grade before and (surprise) she learned more about pedagogy in her recently-acquired degree than she did about actually teaching math to kids. How do you blame parents for that?

There were no grossly apparent product defects in the Edsel. Ford ran a huge PR campaign and pushed on even when it became apparent that the public was resisting very strongly because they knew it was a good car.

Changing campaign managers won't change MittBrand any more than Ford "changed" the Edsel with a marketing plan revamp or Coke convinced folks that New Coke was worth more than one try.

There is absolutely nothing intrinsically "wrong" with Governor Romney, his negatives are very low and because of that he appears "most electable" - just like there was nothing really "wrong" with the Edsel or New Coke.

I wish there were a bit more speculation concerning the reason why Team BOzo has been salivating at the chance to run against Governor Romney. It ain't because he scares them.

"When did it become a parent's job to teach their kid multiplication tables? When I was a kid in the classroom we drilled on this stuff for hours. Did the smart kids get bored? Yes. (I was one of them.) But the point was you have to bring everybody up to speed."

Just so, Porch. If a kid is bored, it's because he or she lacks or hasn't developed the imagination to be creative during those moments. Do I hear Chaco in the background?

My Mom is out of recovery, back in her room, awake, alert, and says the pain is not too bad. She just read through this thread. I watched her machine that keeps track of her pulse & blood pressure and made her stop when it went from 60 to 130. She is chomping at the bit, but needs to figure out how to type with only 1 hand.

She is up moving around awkwardly, will go to the 1st physical therapy late today and thinks she should be able to go home tonight, but nurses say she will be here at least 2 days. They don't know my Mom, when she is determined.

She is telling me to tell Stephanie that Bio Mom said she got what she posted from an NRO Tweet.

I don't know any of you, you don't know me. I was a Perry supporter and I like Newt too because I often engage my mouth before my brain like he does, but I see no way he can win in the end. I am involved with the Tea Party and I just have one thought to leave, remember Dede Scozzafava and Newt's betrayal of the Tea Party, while he was busy playing on the couch with Pelosi, supporting Glowbull Warming. He can't even decide what religion he is, going from Lutheran to Baptist and now Catholic.

Rick, couldn't it be said that Team Epic Fail is salivating to run against any one of the GOP candidates? There's a case to be made in each instance. For every voter who cannot vote for Romney, there is at another one who will never vote for Newt.

I'd say that you have to look at how Governor Romney reacted to a blatantly obvious line of attack and what happened to his tremendous lead in South Carolina in a matter of 10 days.

I understand the theory of low negatives being ever so much nicer than high negatives and I'd like to see the theory applied to that horrid Newt Gingrich with his savage attack on the roots of capitalism as embodied in the strictly meritocratic marvel of Bain Capital.

It seems to me that if a low negative is the sine qua non of elective politics then we should always search for the best looking fence post in the yard. Not disliking someone is just not equivalent to liking, let alone supporting, them.

One of the problems with NCLB that doesn't get talked about a lot is that it is progressive and at the end of the process the rules are that if even ONE child fails then the principal loses his job. So you have a kid who is in the process of dying of cancer and he shows up for the ACT and gets a score below 16. You have a kid who is in the process of developing schizophrenia, who has an acute psychotic event in the middle of the test.

The incentives are clear if you are a principal -- any kid who you know is going to do badly on the test, you expel. Or you lose your job.